Entries from July 2007 ↓

Even though its still July and the affiliate journey should really start tomorrow, we have made some big progress and things are set in place for the ride ahead of us.

Firstly, as you may have noticed we have changed the theme of the blog. Whilst reading the well recommended Copyblogger, I noticed that their theme was available for download. So the reading got put aside and out came the FTP.

A few MySQL errors and permission changes later, we have a lovely new theme for the blog. A vast improvement if I do say so myself.

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So this is really the first week of getting on the affiliate bandwagon. Lets see what we got planned so far.

A lot of progress with our ArticleGOLD affiliate mod today and we should be able to launch it tomorrow. The idea is to be able to show affiliate banners of our choosing for each article. This will make sure that the ads we shown on the article page is targeted but I am still skeptical because most of our visitors are looking for information rather than purchasing. ArticleGOLD gets around 1600 uniques a day so we’ll see what kind of results we’ll get soon.

I will put the affiliate banners in a new column on the right I think. Not the best position but I don’t want to change ArticleGOLD too much at the moment as its bringing in around 25USD a day through Adsense. Be interesting to see how the Adsense is affected too after putting in the code.
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Not good today checking on my Commission Junction account and discovering that the last 2 transactions for the T-shirts site has been deemed invalid due to invalid credit card. Also it seems the guy has put another order in judging from the fact hes ordered 10 T-Shirts of the same type. Anyways, so the current total for July is just less than 50USD which may be less if the latest order is also invalid.

Development wise, it seems that its too much hassle to try to hack our way into Article Dashboard’s encoded script to add my affiliate code. What was decided is that we will put an Iframe in the template file and our code in the Iframe. Which strengthens my desire to rebuild ArticleGOLD from ground up with PhP.

Anyways, I’m off to on a little trip on Star Pisces with the family so I’ll be back on Monday to see if things have improved.

After looking into the world of affiliate marketing quite a bit in the last few days, lets have a look at some of the ways people are making money with affiliate marketing.

Method 1 - Niche site
This method usually involves having a website targeted at a certain niche. Site usually has a few product pages where the affiliate links are placed and the rest will be mainly content pages linked to these product pages. Targeting the right keywords are important in this method and usually the homepage and product pages will require heavy keyword research before starting on the site.

Method 2 - PPC Landing page
This method basically has a landing page with a strong Call to Action for the product being marketed. The idea is to buy your way into profits with PPC. Obviously keyword driven again and need to be careful regarding merchant terms and spending too much. I have called it PPC Landing page, but basically any method to get traffic to the page could be used including organic search, socials, forum spamming, and whatever else takes your fancy.
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Wow, my eyes are tired. I’ve been browsing affiliate forums, blogs, tutorials, guides and whatever else I have had time for. This in addition to 6 books I brought from Amazon has meant that I have officially no time for proper work , haha.

Actually, it was the first time I ordered from Amazon and was pleasantly surprised at the speed I got the books. It took less than 2 weeks for the order to reach my Hong Kong address.

Talking about Amazon, someone ordered a USD70 watch through us which was fun. However it was a third party product and has less commission apparently. Time to do more reading on the Amazon site methinks.

Anyways, the point of the thread was to list out some useful stuff that I have been reading lately so here goes.
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Its always advisable to set goals and milestones. We list our targets and milestones for the coming 6 months for our affiliate marketing. Hopefully, I can come back to refer to this thread with pride in future posts.

Its near the end of July now so as per my previous post, we have around USD100 so far for this month from affiliates as a starting point.

August 07 - Target USD150 - 150% increase from previous month
Hey I am not greedy!!! Actually, because we are just starting out, I guess most of the month will be reading, reviewing ideas, starting things off and finishing off a few things.

It also gives me less pressure which is always good.

The main priority targets and tasks for this month are:
1. Decide upon 2 main affiliate projects and do planning.
2. Complete affiliate data feed script we are developing and implement on at least one site for testing purposes.
3. Complete ArticleGOLD affiliate script and implement.
4. Register affiliate earnings from at least 3 merchants.
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Well, as per my New Direction for Xenyo, you are at the start of a journey. I think we’ll call it ‘An SEO’s journey into Affiliate marketing’. This post is the first of the new category in which I’ll start with a bit of why we are launching this new category and then a review of our current affiliate marketing position.

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Just a short post to inform our readers and visitors that Xenyo will be taking a new direction. We will not be taking on any new SEO clients on with our current model. The main reason behind this is purely a business decision as our profit from our own projects far exceed that from our SEO service. The decision was made so that we could free more time to devote to our projects.

Existing clients have been informed that we will continue to provide our service to them as if nothing has changed. In fact, we will soon streamline and improve our SEO offerings and tailor them to companies that already have some Internet marketing knowledge, more on this on later posts.

Oks, so what of Xenyo.com …….

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Depending on which internet marketing community you frequent, you will get different advice to this question. Google itself doesn’t tell you not to, just that you should add a ‘no follow’ tag to your sold links.

The argument that Google itself makes money from paid advertisement I think is weak as their guidelines is to prevent manipulation of their SERPs. The argument that they recommend directory submissions to Yahoo which charges USD300 for a listing holds more weight though.

The way I see it is that the search engines don’t want to penalize your site for selling links but rather penalize your links. There are numerous big firms and established websites with valid links to their sponsors, partners, friends, etc. I think its too hard for algorithms to differentiate with near 100% accuracy whether links were sold or valid, the risks to their SERPs quality in getting these algos wrong will urge search engines to look for alternatives to handing out penalties to sites. So the likely scenario if a search engine doesn’t like your linking methods is that your outbounds will be affected.

Is that so bad a thing?

Of course if you overdo your link selling with no regards to the quality of sites you are linking to then thats something else entirely and maybe topic for another post. I recommend that if you do wish to sell links, try to make it a bit more established in your niche first though as outbounds links from your site gives hints to search engines what your site is about. Think of the message you will be telling the search engines for your baseball site to have 10 site wide links to health sites and 2 to celebrity blogs.

The above are just my views as I just got an email notifying me that someone subscribed to a text link on one of my old sites. I didnt even recall I had any sites set up with TextLinkAds before that email. Anyways, as a test I set up their code on a couple more content sites I had to see if these can stack up.

The beauty of TextLinkAds though is that I don’t have to do anything, they market, place the links, remove the links, etc. Also learnt that they had a new feature for bloggers where I think people buy words on your blog posts, again its completely hands off so i threw in the plug-in on one of my blogs and one day later I got a subscription…. not bad indeedy.

The only compliant I have with them though is that they take 50% of the sales. I realize that its a service but 50% seems a bit too drastic. I won’t be using them for my established sites but if you have any old sites lying around, preferably with high Page Ranks, its a nice effortless way of making a bit of money from them.

Regular readers will know that we run an article directory called ArticleGOLD . What started out as an experiment using an ArticleDashboard script sprinkled with some SEO powder grew quite rapidly to becoming one of the more successful directories on the Net.

It will be soon growing pass 2000 uniques a day and brings in handy Adsense revenue at a high CTR. The articles that we approve are all reviewed and of comparatively good quality. Many many submissions daily. So whats wrong with it?

To me it just doesnt seem right … this last couple of days I have been thinking of a direction change for ArticleGOLD to somehow put it right. First we need to find out what is wrong.

Putting it through TropicalSEO’s Is your site Defensible Quiz , ArticleGOLD scores quite well actually and I would say it passes 8 of the the 10 items.

7. Does your site have some sort of remarkable value?
Hes got me …..

We always try to make our sites have some value but well because of the nature that ArticeGOLD started, its just an articles directory. An article directory with good content but nevertheless, an article directory out of the countless hundreds out there. Worse, its still uses the AD script, taken nothing away from the great script (P.S. please lose the encrytion.)

I mean, how many article directories does the world need? This number I presume is considerably less than the number article marketers think they need. Alot of directories auto approve articles and seeing as ArticleGOLD rejects over half the articles submitted, thats alot of useless and wrong information on the Internet.

The ratio of quality articles submitted against articles written for the sole purpose of having 3 links in the resource box is less than ten to one from my experience of doing editorial duties for ArticleGOLD.

If we are making an articles directory for marketers then it needs to be something different because I see them going down the route of link directories if not already. Do a google search on an article you find on any directory and you’ll see what I mean.

We move swiftly on to item 10 of TropicalSEO’s list - Are you thinking about/working on defensibility?

I want to make it clear that I am not trying to turn ArticleGOLD into a Wikipedia because its an article directory. To me, a typical articles directory should service 3 types of users.

Authors - Its should help authors and article marketers get their articles and resource box seen.

Webmasters - ArticleGOLD is a free articles directory so webmasters should be able to easily find articles that they can use or refer to.

Visitors - This includes the visitors from search engines and feed subscribers that arrive at the article. The directory should make sure that the article is of quality and not be misleading.

Does your article directory give value to these people?

To me, I dont think that the current build of article directories do and there is room for improvement. Let me finetune a few ideas and I’ll post back on here when we’re ready.